* Work at hand to test Advanced Encryption Standard interoperability
Advanced Encryption Standard is gradually becoming part of most IPSec VPN platforms, and someday will likely overtake Triple-DES as the standard most often used. In anticipation of that day the VPN Consortium, a group of VPN equipment vendors, has set up interoperability testing for AES.
While not a certification that equipment made by one vendor will work with all standards-compliant gear, it does show that a vendor’s product interoperates with devices made by nine other vendors that tested at the same time. Details on the testing can be found at the https://www.vpnc.org/detail-aes-interop.html page of VPNC’s Web site.
The test consists of setting each system up based on a uniform profile and then seeing whether they could communicate with equipment made by other vendors. The test included initiating sessions from individual computers as well as responding to sessions initiated by other vendor’s gear.
Eight of the initial 10 companies that tested could pass the test in both directions with all the others. The other two companies tested remote access clients, so always initiated sessions. They succeeded with all the other vendors. The Web site listed above has links that lead to more details about the test results, vendor by vendor.
The adoption of AES can only be helped by more companies demonstrating this interoperability. It can assure potential users that the equipment that they own will create VPN tunnels with gear owned by business partners even if the partners buy from a different VPN vendor.
AES itself is the standard required by the U.S. government and not only is stronger than Triple-DES, but also requires less processing power.
